A few weeks ago I picked up a whole stack of Xserves. I had been looking for a first gen G4 Xserve which has the tray load optical drive instead of the slot load and the rest of them were believed to be all G5’s. Never having had a Cluster Node model either, I was happy to see 8 of them in the stack. The purpose of this was to make some cool videos for my YouTube channel. When I…
Recently on Mac Yak episode #11 (which unfortunately got horribly mangled by YouTube so it’s not easy to watch) the topic of Classic data preservation and transfer was brought up. The topic was “How to transfer files between old and new Macs” and got me thinking, how far back can we go to send files between different Macs and OS versions? What really is the best way to package this data to ensure it survives transfers to Windows PC’s, Linux…
You’re about to meet a buyer that has the Mac you want. A quick power on test to see if it even fires up, a quick glance at the About This Mac and System Report.. hmm looks alright. You hand over the cash, take your new Mac home and find it’s not in as good of a state as you thought it was. There is a very easy test you can do to get a general idea of the overall…
Dramatic headline isn’t it? Sure it’s probably clickbait but it’s the truth none the less. I’m talking about the application Activity Monitor. Years ago I got my hands on a switch that supported LAG (Link Aggregate), the ability to merge two ethernet ports together and get a considerable bandwidth boost. Not all LAG/LACP are the same and implementation standards even vary between manufacturers so some might use LAG as failover, others to get more bandwidth. My goal was of course,…
The date is December 22nd, 2018 and my friend Michael goes out to pick up an iMac G5. $50, in good shape, nothing special. He’s wanted one for a while just to add to his collection and finally found one locally. He meets the seller which tells him he got this from a woman that used to work at Apple. Sure, whatever, he thinks. Just trying to justify the pricetag. Michael buys it, takes it home and thinks nothing of…
Before we dive in, let’s see Apple’s take on this question. From their website “Maximizing Battery Life and Lifespan” (linked to from their page “Apple Lithium-ion Batteries” that holds zero useful information) we get the following advice: Avoid extreme ambient temperatures. Your device is designed to perform well in a wide range of ambient temperatures, with 62° to 72° F (16° to 22° C) as the ideal comfort zone. Remove certain cases during charging. Charging your device when it’s inside certain styles…
So, I’m stuck. Well not really stuck but I do not have enough time available to invest into figuring it out. So I figured I’d write this up and maybe the awesome community can help me out 🙂 Once this is figured out I can probably document the process and add it to the PPC Overclocking Station page where everyone will be able to enjoy it. Searching the interwebs you can find plenty of references to this. Sites like Macrumors…
This is a post in the Project Maya series. To see all related posts go to the index page here. I added fans, took fans out, tested different fans, experimented with different thermal pastes and even thermal pads. The biggest change I wanted to make to the cooling since day one, was the heat sink. The aluminum block got the job done but I wanted better so of course the search began for a copper heat sink. Found a few…
How many fans does a Power Mac G5 have? Depending on the configuration this answer varies but you can be almost sure the answer is always one short. Let’s take a look at the Late 2005 Quad in this example. – 2 intake fans (front inlet fan assembly) – 2 exhaust fans (rear exhaust fan assembly) – 1 fan in the PCI bay (speaker assembly) – 1 fan for the hard drives (media bay fan) 6 fans total, right? Wrong….
Once in a while I take on a project that involves something I’ve never done before. This time it is the revival and overclocking of a Power Mac G4 (MDD) dual 1.25GHz CPU card. This card was working fine until someone decided to take the world’s biggest soldering iron to it in an attempt to overclock it to 1.5GHz. Just like making a sandwich with an excavator, this was doomed to fail. The card fried, pads and traces burned right…